Post-Ripley Feminism in “Getaway”: How An Awful Film Can Matter

How do you make a terrible film, actress, and director infinitely more interesting?

Is it possible? Is it wise to use a terrible film to highlight discussion of gender politics in Hollywood?

These questions might never find answers, but a good place to start looking is in what we see onscreen and recognize first: The human body; the actress herself.

The majority of her lines amount to nothing more than fearful ejaculations. No doubt, her budding image as a young sex symbol—meant to inspire ejaculations of a different kind—is responsible for her landing the part in the first place. She’s pretty. She’s popular. She’s modestly talented. She epitomizes everything that makes celebrity such a shallow, superficial affair on all fronts. She’s Selena Gomez, and she stars in Getaway, one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, due for release this Friday.

It was inevitable that a film helmed by the same man who gave us Dungeons & Dragons would be as terrible as it sounds on paper: a woman is kidnapped and her husband, Brent Magna (Ethan Hawke), is forced to indulge a crafty criminal mastermind (Jon Voight) and his diabolical wishes to retrieve her. “The Voice,” as Voight’s character is billed, outfits a car with cameras and microphones and forces Magna to steal it, coaching his victim through a series of illegal tasks with the goal of wreaking enough havoc on the city of Sofia, Bulgaria to distract police from a bank heist.

Courtney Solomon, the captain of this ill-fated shit-ship, hasn’t directed a film in nearly eight years, and it certainly shows. From the sloppy editing to the pitiful narrative logic, the film borders on incoherence unlike any other film I’ve seen in its final cut phase. It isn’t until Gomez’s character (known only as “The Kid”) enters the picture that the film takes on a slightly more enjoyable tone thanks (in part) to the unintentional hilarity of her casting. During my screening, the audience erupted with laughter as Gomez appears onscreen for the first time—clad in “tough girl” attire including a baseball cap and hood—pointing a gun into the car of Hawke’s character and demanding that he “get the fuck out.” She might as well have been a plush toy, and the gun a lollipop. Note to future filmmakers: babyface and intimidation aren’t synonymous.

It turns out that the car Magna drives in fact belongs to The Kid. One thing leads to another, and we’re forced to endure 90 minutes of painstakingly pathetic excuses for chase scenes as Selena Gomez frantically screams in the passenger seat.

As annoying as Gomez is as a person, The Kid as a character is a rare highpoint in a murky sea of inadequacy, both in terms of the film and the industry that produced it. For starters:

A) She’s young, and isn’t a sex object

In fact, as sexual as the real-life image of Selena Gomez is, she’s clothed in a bulky hoodie for the majority of the film. Usually roles like this are reserved for older actresses, ones that Hollywood deems as incapable of sexual appeal once they hit 40. But, the efforts undergone to desexualize The Kid are extensive. Her position in relation to Hawke’s character is merely coincidental and not founded on sexual attraction. They’re two people on an even playing field. He is married, and she’s just along for the ride. There’s never a moment where Magna’s determination to get to his wife is broken. The film doesn’t feel the need to justify her presence in relation to a male’s. After all, she actively pursues a male for reasons other than to capture his penis and use it to fulfill a part of her that’s missing; the girl just wants her car back, and uses a gun to try it. She sees herself on an even playing field, stepping to the much bigger Magna, and doesn’t seem like she’s trying to prove anything. Merely existing.

B) She’s nobody’s property

Of course, The Kid is her father’s daughter. But, as most children tend to be, they are their parents’ children. Gender, at least here, is irrelevant. She reveals that her dad owns numerous banks throughout the country, and that the car (a souped-up Mustang) was a gift for her 16th birthday. Here, we could have easily lost The Kid to a different kind of sexual marginalizing. She could have readily fallen into the “Daddy’s girl” category which defines so many teen girls in contemporary films. However, we never even meet her father throughout the film’s run. She mentions it once, and only again when the heist is revealed to be taking place at one of her father’s banks. In fact, she actually uses her knowledge of the intricate inner-workings of the bank system to foil The Voice’s plans. It’s Magna, in this situation, who is at the mercy of another man using a woman to bait him to do his bidding. For once we see a woman in a position of power (The Kid, of course, not the idiot who got herself kidnapped) and the male relegated to a one-note, cold-staring, heart-aching quest to retrieve the vagina he feels is rightfully his. As The Kid’s cunning shines through in key scenes, we also being to realize that:

C) She’s not stupid

If she isn’t a sex object, isn’t someone’s girlfriend, isn’t at the mercy of her father, and isn’t conventionally “unattractive,” she has to have the intelligence of a paperweight, right? Wrong. We’re given little information about her home life, with the film only giving us enough information to satisfy our curiosity’s as to why she belongs in the film in the first place. She has a powerful father, but he remains unseen for the film’s entirety. He has money, but she doesn’t talk about spending it frivolously. She shows huge interest in computers and technology when confronted with the cameras-in-the-car-so-he’s-watching-us thing, prompting Magna to question her ability to handle things like hacking and rewiring. “Oh, a girl likes cars and computers. How butch. This is the 21st Century, you should try joining it,” she tells him, also speaking directly to the audience as we understand her as a smart, talented woman spitting in the face of so many other characters who would have just sat back and screamed the entire time while forming a sort of Stockholm Syndrome-esque attraction to the man driving the car.

The Kid is absolutely that girl, though, in a select few scenes. There must be pages of the script where The Kid’s only lines are things like “Slow down!” *screams* “Stop!” and “We’re going to die!”, but it’s easy to give her a pass because of what she represents as a character written with what seems to be feminist inspiration. It’s sad that female characters like this exist so rarely in these types of mainstream films that they have to be dissected in such a manner. This case is particularly interesting because The Kid is in a film that, by all means, no one should care about. It’s loud, it’s silly, and it’s stupid, and Solomon has to understand that he’s not taken seriously as a filmmaker given his lousy track record both directing and producing. The fact that The Kid is treated almost as an afterthought—and still exists free of the tropes usually plaguing contemporary female characters—is a true testament to how the filmmakers view women, and how women should be represented in film.

It’s a shame that the film is so terrible, and that the only other female character is such a pathetic excuse for a role, but her victimized status is balanced by a strong female character who ultimately becomes the most interesting, varied, and dynamic person throughout the film.

Sandra Bullock in “Gravity” – opens October 4th

2013 has proven to be an amazing year for women in Hollywood. Sandra Bullock is earning rave reviews for her film-carrying performance in Gravity, Vera Farmiga similarly escaped sexual objectification and male-dependent status in The Conjuring, and the “Bridesmaids Effect” continues to work its magic as female-driven comedies like Identity Thief, The Heat, and The To-Do List make exponentially more than they cost to produce, while male-driven and targeted films with hefty price tags continue to sink.

The best way to think about Getaway, however terrible it might be, is to focus on these characters that are all interchangeable with the opposite gender. The Kid could have easily been a male with minimal script restructuring. As Brent and his wife could just as easily switched roles. It’s telling because the only other film that automatically pops into my mind when talking about interchangeable parts is Alien, which contains a script that was intentionally written so that each of the characters could be played by a man or a woman. The film doesn’t get any better, but this single element has given me more to talk about in terms of gender politics in Hollywood than Iron Man or The Lone Ranger.

While Getaway is lightyears away from the quality of Alien, at least we can credit Solomon for allowing Ripley to live on in the smallest of ways all these 34 years later.